Before automation, consumers generally formed patties of food product by hand. However, demand (e.g., the fast-food industry) for high-speed and high-volume product of food products led to the development of automated machines configured to provide molded food product. Generally, such machines mold the food product under pressure into patties of various shapes and sizes. A typical application for food product molding machines is in the production of hamburger patties. Yet, the type of food product (e.g., vegetables, meat, fish, etc.) and shape (e.g., rods, patties, etc.) can vary. The molded food products are distributed to restaurants, grocery stores, etc. The demand for high volume, high-speed food product molding machinery continues to grow.
However, prior art food product molding machines have several drawbacks. For example, known molding machine use hydraulic or mechanical crank systems to reciprocate the lateral back and forth motion of a mold plate from a fill position over a fill position of fill plate of the food product forming machine. These hydraulic and mechanical crank systems are cumbersome to control and do not provide consistent compaction of food product patties. Furthermore, finding the optimum fill position of a mold plate requires machining new fill positions into a fill plate, or producing several fill plates and replacing the fill plates as needed according to the characteristics of the product being molded.
As can be seen, the present state of the art of mold drive assemblies incorporated into food product molding machines has definite shortcomings.